The present disclosure relates to an electronic shelf label system and a communications method thereof.
Traditionally, a paper tag scheme displaying price information in which information is directly hand written on a tag or printed thereon by a printer has been used as a scheme of displaying product information for customers on product display stands. However, such a paper tag scheme has disadvantages, in that paper tags should be replaced whenever price information of merchandise items is changed or the positions of displayed merchandise items are changed.
Research into and development of an electronic tag scheme capable of making up for the disadvantages of a paper tag scheme as described above has been conducted. Recently, an electronic tag scheme has been limitedly applied to some product display stands. Such an electronic tag scheme is known as an electronic shelf label (ESL) system.
Generally, an electronic shelf label (ESL) system may be installed on product display stands and display, while allowing for changes in, product information.
The electronic shelf label system may include an upper server, a plurality of gateways connected to one upper server in a wired scheme, and a plurality of electronic tag groups connected to the plurality of gateways, respectively, in a wireless scheme.
The upper server may provide the product information including the price information to each of the plurality of gateways by wired communications.
Each of the plurality of gateways may transmit the product information received from the upper server to a corresponding electronic tag group by wireless communications.
Here, the corresponding electronic tag group may receive the product information by the wireless communications and display the price information included in the product information on a displaying unit.
The electronic shelf label system as described above may automatically update the product information and rapidly change the product information, in a wireless communications scheme.
Recently, as a near field communications (NFC) chip has been applied to portable terminals such as smartphones, research into and development of applications in which an NFC chip is also mounted in the electronic tag to perform NFC communications with the NFC chip of the portable terminal, thereby transmitting and receiving buying product information between the electronic tag and the portable terminal, have been conducted.
However, since the NFC chip is not mounted in all smartphones and it is still difficult to secure compatibility with the NFC chip, particularly in the case in which the NFC chip is mounted in the smartphone, a method of allowing all customers to buy merchandise items using NFC communications regardless of whether or not a NFC chip is mounted in a smartphone has been required in a store selling the merchandise items.
The following Related Art Document (Patent Document 1), which relates to an ESL system and a method of confirming product information and paying for a product, does not disclose a technical feature in which all customers may use NFC communications at the time of buying merchandise items regardless of whether or not an NFC chip is embedded in a user terminal such as a smartphone, or the like, in a store selling merchandise items.